Baked Chicken Curry

Traditional Chicken Curry is sinful due to although not limited to the following reasons:

It delivers taste through fat and oil. I have been guilty of heating a puddle of oil to release the aroma of my curry paste and rendering chicken fat for extra oomph
The usage of a lot of curry powder to deliver taste and thicken curry.
The flavourful curry is savoured through overeating of rice and chicken in general

Well today, after my experiment, Chicken Curry can be less sinful and MORE delicious? Absolutely, and I’ll tell you why. The Traditional Chicken Curry is most delicious when we savour the gravy. The meat plays second fiddle to aromatic gravy because a lot of the chicken juices have been released and combined into the aromatic curry. To fully enjoy it, one must take a spoonful of curry, meat and rice to enjoy the most heavenly experience of this Malaysian favourite. While it is possible to have rice and curry, it is almost impossible to have chicken curry scraped off its gravy with rice - the taste is too…’subtle’ ^.^

My Baked Chicken Curry aims to lock in all the flavours into the meat, while maintaining its succulent texture.

So from the picture above, you can see that The Most Important tip is to roast spices like fennel, coriander and cumin to release their aroma and ground them finely.

Cook the curry paste with little oil, a tablespoon for this big bowl of paste is adequate. The trick to releasing the aroma is the usage of high heat. Keep cooking the paste until it dries up and add water to sizzle it up. The process is repeated for over 30 minutes. My curry paste is a blend of onions, old ginger paste, garlic paste, shaved cinnamon, dried chilli paste, turmeric powder and a blend of the roasted spices earlier. There are a lot of curry leaves here. There can never be too many curry leaves, they are the most wonderful ingredient in a curry.

When it’s done, keep the cooked paste aside to cool.